Amazon.com down briefly, following Microsoft, Google outages

The Amazon.com portal went down today in an outage that’s likely to cost the Seattle e-commerce giant millions of dollars in lost sales.

There are plenty of vendors and consultants who will scare you that the cost of an outage is expensive. The cost of the amazon.com outage is covered by the media as $5 mil.

Amazon.com's website went down midday Monday for about 40 minutes. The reason for the outage was unclear, although it appeared to have been widespread.

The outage could have cost the company an estimated $4.72 million in lost sales, based on an estimate that the company takes in $9,823 every five seconds.

Realistically how much did Amazon.com lose? How many users just came back later? What is the revenue rate at the time of the outage. Only Amazon.com knows how much money it lost, and what were the overall impact to sales.

Did this outage cause users to lose faith in amazon.com for shopping?

Outages are a fact of life for those who deliver services over the web. Nothing is perfect. How fast your recover and how you handle the outage is many times more important than the short term revenue hit.

A mistake was made somewhere. Amazon is up and running again. It only affected North America.